


Acceptance

by loversandantiheroes



Series: Blackberry Stone [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Brief Sexual Situations, F/M, Gen, Grief, Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 07:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2260947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loversandantiheroes/pseuds/loversandantiheroes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The second round entry for the Rumbelle Showdown, revised and reposted.</p><p>Prompts: Relaxation, Masked highwayman, Happier times</p><p>This fic follows closely with “Remembrance” and carries over some of the same headcanons and plot points. This one is set early in 3b, while Rumple is still presumed dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acceptance

_I’d be sad that I never held your hand as you were lowered_  
 _But I’d understand that I’d never let it go_  
 _I’d be sad that I never held your hand as you were lowered_  
 _But I’d understand the world does what it does_

\- Laura Marling,  _Blackberry Stone_

_———————-_

Time was a thief. It was a highwayman masked in sackcloth and ashes that waylaid every traveler in its course, ordering them to stand and deliver. Time stripped away everything; youth, beauty, strength, love, joy, leaving nothing but regret, longing, emptiness, and memories that tasted as bitter as poisoned honey. What was worse, in her mind, was that eventually time claimed even the memories of joy, bleaching them clean like bones under an unyielding sun. Loved ones faded, their faces forgotten, voices vague echoes. The happiest moments of your life became so distant and remote they may as well have been the dreams of a stranger mentioned in passing. Time purged both good and bad without discrimination, taking whispered vows and spiteful curses in equal stride.

Once upon a time, Belle had a family. She’d had a mother, a father, and once, before she was born, she’d had a brother. Alain was the firstborn, heir to the Marchlands, and Alain had died in the cradle barely two months after he had been born when a plague had crept into the kingdom with the December snows. Five years later, a scant two weeks after Belle’s fourth birthday, the plague came again, and this time it was her mother who succumbed. The disease came upon her in the night, as much a thief as Time itself, and had stolen away her health, her vitality, and eventually, when she was little more than a wasted husk buried under thick blankets, it had stolen her life too.

Belle remembered her brother in name only, and her mother in an ever-fading abstract. A scent of dried roses, the feel of paper-velvet petals crackling in her tiny fingers; fragments of rhymes and poems chanted in a high, clear voice. She had simply been too young to hold tight to her memories; time had stolen them away before she was old enough to know they were gone.

Her father was gone now, too, barely three months in his grave, and the ache there had not yet departed. Time had come for him with a blood clot in his brain, and he had died on the slate floor of his greenhouse, hands grasping at the yellow rosebush he had been trying to revive. Dr. Whale hadn’t told her this, nor had the paramedics. Belle had found it out for herself when she went to his shop, which, in accordance with his will, had been given to her. The rosebush had still been lying on the stone tiles, wilting in a pile of fallen petals and dark droplets of dried blood. More blood crusted the thorny stems of the rose, and she knew there would have been divots in the flesh of her father’s hands to match the thorns.

She had wept then, alone in a dead man’s shop, because among other things a yellow rose was a symbol of forgiveness. The bush had been a peace offering he had not lived to give to her.

Belle took the rosebush and planted it by the steps of Rumple’s house, and when she had finished, streaked with dirt and tears and crisscrossed with bloody scratches he had kissed her. Rumple had known all too well what Time could take in the end, and his gentleness then had been the only salve on the wound. But now Time had taken him as well; her man, her love, leaving her without even a body to bury. Only memories that would burn away in the face of Time like dew under a Beltane sun.

She found herself in Rumple’s shop more and more in the aftermath, sorting through relics and trinkets he had acquired by deal or by chance, detritus from the broken lives of countless others. All magic comes with a price, and the more powerful the magic the steeper the price. He reminded them by the score, the desperate and dangerous, heartsick and dying. The shelves of his shop were overflowing with the resounding answer of thousands.

Belle sat now on the cold floor of the back room, a steaming cup of tea in her lap, her head lolling back against the cot where Rumple had called her once, strained and fading. A hero, he called her, a beautiful woman who had loved an ugly man. She breathed deeply, trying hard to relax, to will the tension out of her limbs and the crushing tightness out of her chest. Tears coursed down her cheeks, but this was so commonplace to her now that she barely noticed. She was alone again, weeping for a dead man in a dead man’s shop, breathing in a lingering smell of wood smoke and amber. It was his smell, in his hair and on his hands and the ache in her chest deepened. Belle sipped her tea, thinking of the peculiar curve of Rumple’s nose, of his rough and throaty laugh, so rare to hear. The way the silver in his hair glinted. The way he had held her when she first walked into this very room what seemed like a lifetime ago.

It hurt to be here, hurt like a dull and twisting dagger, but nowhere did she feel his presence as keenly as she did here, and she was determined to immerse herself in it. She would sit here every day if she must, breathing in his scent until it faded, committing herself to the recall of his face and his voice, building up his form in her mind until it was fixed in her memory too deeply to be eroded. Time would not take Rumpelstiltskin from her twice.

At any rate, it hurt less to be in his shop than to be in his home. Home was where he had first taken her to his bed, both of them trembling and nervous, warming slowly to gentle, pliant kisses, rocking together as their passion kindled and her pain melted into pleasure and they had cried out each other’s names as they burned. Home had become a reminder of the things she would never have again. A long lazy morning in bed, her forehead on his chest and his hand on her hip. Evening kisses under the porch light, unmindful of curious glances from passersby.

Now home was the place where she woke in a panic in the dead of night, frantic hands tearing at the bedsheets when they found the space where he used to lie was cold and empty. Home was where she found the price of their own magic. True Love, a magic so powerful it could bring down kingdoms and shake entire worlds with a simple kiss, had the dearest price of all, it seemed. The price was Time. Time wasted, Time stolen. A future planned and never lived.

Home was theirs, but the shop was his. Three hundred years of his life reflected on the walls and shelves and crammed into displays, centuries of planning for a singular purpose, a singular end, and somehow it made it easier to bear when she was here, surrounded by the reminders that her love had known all along that someday there would be a reckoning, someday there would be a price to pay, that Time would eventually catch up and take its due, and that in the end he had accepted that. He had walked out into the street whole and hale, without the crutch of his cane or his magic, and he had embraced his fate as he embraced the man who had set the whole sorry farce into motion so long ago. Rumpel had spoken his love for her, for his son, and had given himself up for them both.

 _If he could accept that_ , she thought to herself whenever she missed him too dearly, or the hole in her chest threatened to swallow her up,  _then so can I._


End file.
